If you stream music (and who doesn't these days) you've obviously come across abbreviations at the end of the audio files. The acronyms reading WAV, FLAC, MP3 and so on, are called audio codecs. You may have wondered what they mean and even Googled them only to be overwhelmed by complex information catering strictly to audiophiles. Therefore, we decided to put together a guide explaining the concepts in layman terms.

The quality of an audio file is dependent primarily on three variables: sample rate, sample depth and bit rate. These variables are used when analog audio is converted into digital audio, and affect the overall audio quality. The higher each of these three variables are, the better your audio is going to sound.


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The sampling rate refers to the number of times a sample of an audio file is taken in a second or the number of samples recorded in a single second. It is measured in samples per second or Hertz (Hz/kHz). These samples are taken at equal intervals, and affect the depth of the audio. The more samples there are in a second, the greater detail that audio signal is going to carry.

Sample rate in audio is analogous to frame rate in video. The higher the frame rate, the more depth and detail you can capture of every split-second within the video and the smoother the end product is going to be. The most common values for sample rate are 44.1kHz (most common for music CDs), and 48kHz (most common for audio tracks in movies).

The second most important variable affecting audio resolution is sample depth. Also known as sample size or sample precision, it refers to the quality of a sample. While sample rate is just a quantitative measure of the number of samples in a second, the sample depth represents the quality of each recorded sample.

In order to compress an audio file to be significantly smaller in size, certain data is strategically removed from the file. The data removed is almost always frequencies that are not audible by the human ear. Removing this data leads to a considerable amount of information being taken out from the bit stream, resulting in an overall smaller file size.

An audio codec is a device or computer program capable of encoding or decoding a digital data stream (a codec) that encodes or decodes audio.[1][2][3][4] In software, an audio codec is a computer program implementing an algorithm that compresses and decompresses digital audio data according to a given audio file or streaming media audio coding format. The objective of the algorithm is to represent the high-fidelity audio signal with a minimum number of bits while retaining quality. This can effectively reduce the storage space and the bandwidth required for transmission of the stored audio file. Most software codecs are implemented as libraries which interface to one or more multimedia players. Most modern audio compression algorithms are based on modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT) coding and linear predictive coding (LPC).

In hardware, audio codec refers to a single device that encodes analog audio as digital signals and decodes digital back into analog. In other words, it contains both an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and digital-to-analog converter (DAC) running off the same clock signal. This is used in sound cards that support both audio in and out, for instance. Hardware audio codecs send and receive digital data using buses such as AC-Link, IS, SPI, IC, etc. Most commonly the digital data is linear PCM, and this is the only format that most codecs support, but some legacy codecs support other formats such as G.711 for telephony.

Even modest quality, high-fidelity stereo sound can use a substantial amount of disk space. For web developers, an even bigger concern is the network bandwidth needed in order to transfer audio, whether for streaming or to download it for use during gameplay. The processing of audio data to encode and decode it is handled by an audio codec (COder/DECoder). In this article, we look at audio codecs used on the web to compress and decompress audio, what their capabilities and use cases are, and offer guidance when choosing audio codecs to use for your content.

Additionally, WebRTC implementations generally use a subset of these codecs for their encoding and decoding of media, and may support additional codecs as well, for optimal cross-platform support of video and audio conferencing, and to integrate better with legacy telecommunication solutions. See Codecs used by WebRTC for details.

The list below denotes the codecs most commonly used on the web and which containers (file types) support them. If all you need to know is which codecs are even possible to use, this is for you. Of course, individual browsers may or may not choose to support all of these codecs, and their support for which container types can use them may vary as well. In addition, browsers may choose to support additional codecs not included on this list.

When MPEG-1 Audio Layer III codec data is stored in an MPEG file, and there is no video track on the file, the file is typically referred to as an MP3 file, even though it's still an MPEG format file.

There are two general categories of factors that affect the encoded audio which is output by an audio codec's encoder: details about the source audio's format and contents, and the codec and its configuration during the encoding process.

For each factor that affects the encoded audio, there is a simple rule that is nearly always true: because the fidelity of digital audio is determined by the granularity and precision of the samples taken to convert it into a data stream, the more data used to represent the digital version of the audio, the more closely the sampled sound will match the source material.

Because encoded audio inherently uses fewer bits to represent each sample, the source audio format may actually have less impact on the encoded audio size than one might expect. However, a number of factors do still affect the encoded audio quality and size. The table below lists a number of key source audio file format factors and their impact on the encoded audio.

Of course, these effects can be altered by decisions made while encoding the audio. For example, if the encoder is configured to reduce the sample rate, the sample rate's effect on the output file will be reduced in kind.

Audio codecs typically employ cleverly-designed and highly-complex mathematical algorithms to take source audio data and compress it to take substantially less space in memory or network bandwidth. In addition to choosing the type of encoder to use, you may have the opportunity to adjust the encoder using parameters that choose specific algorithms, tune those algorithms, and specify how many passes to apply while encoding.

There are two basic categories of audio compression. Lossless compression algorithms reduce the size of the audio without compromising the quality or fidelity of the sound. Upon decoding audio compressed with a lossless codec such as FLAC or ALAC, the result is identical in every way to the original sound, down to the bit.

Because of the differences in how lossy codecs work compared to lossless ones, especially the fact that lossless ones have to be much more conservative with their compression, lossy codecs nearly always result in significantly smaller compressed audio than lossless codecs do.

Generally speaking, the most common reasons to choose lossless audio are because you require archival-quality storage, or because the audio samples will be remixed and recompressed, and you wish to avoid the amplification of artifacts in the audio due to recompression. For real-time streaming of audio, a lossy codec is usually required in order to ensure the flow of data can keep up with the audio playback rate regardless of network performance.

The audio delivered to each speaker in a sound system is provided by one audio channel in a stream. Monaural sound is a single channel. Stereo sound is two. 5.1 surround sound has five audio channels, plus one Low Frequency Enhancement (LFE) channel.

LFE channels are specifically designed to store low-frequency audio data, and are commonly used to provide audio data for subwoofers, for example. When you see the number of audio channels written in the form X.Y (such as 2.1 or 5.1), the number after the decimal point, Y, is the number of LFE channels. For example, MP3 supports one LFE channel, while AAC supports up to 16.

In addition to providing audio for specific speakers in a sound system, some codecs may allow audio channels to be used to provide alternative audio, such as vocals in different languages or descriptive audio for visually impaired people.

The audio frequency bandwidth of a codec indicates the range of audio frequencies that can be represented using the codec. Some codecs operate specifically by eliminating audio that falls outside a given frequency range. There is a correlation between the sample rate and the maximum sound frequency that can be represented by a waveform represented by a codec. At a theoretical level, the maximum frequency a codec can represent is the sample rate divided by two; this frequency is called the Nyquist frequency. In reality, the maximum is slightly lower, but it's close.

The audio frequency bandwidth comes into play especially vividly when a codec is designed or configured to represent human speech rather than a broad range of sounds. Human speech generally resides within the audio frequency range of 300 Hz to 18 kHz. However, the vast majority of human vocalizations exist in the range 300 Hz to 8 kHz, and you can capture enough of human vocalizations in the frequency range 500 Hz to 3 kHz to still be understandable.

For that reason, speech-specific codecs often begin by dropping sound that falls outside a set range. That range is the audio frequency bandwidth. G.722, for example, strips away sounds outside the audio frequency bandwidth of 50 Hz to 7 kHz. This reduces the amount of data that needs to be encoded from the outset. 006ab0faaa

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